Leveraging the HBS platform to enter social enterprise

Hello there! My name is Ali Huberlie, and I’m extremely excited to begin my first year at Harvard Business School! I’m also looking forward to blogging here, and sharing all the various aspects of my HBS journey here with you.

I’ll begin with some background. I originally hail from Hollis, New Hampshire, but attended undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. At Penn, I double-majored in Urban Studies and Political Science, and spent much of my non-academic time working for an organization that starts debate teams in Philly’s public high schools and middle schools. After spending virtually all of undergrad involved in the public sector, I decided to try something totally different after my graduation in 2011. So, I moved to New York City and began working in Foreign Exchange Sales at Credit Suisse.

The job, with all of its required attention to current events, actually spoke really well to my interest in political science. I also enjoyed many aspects of sales, and was given tremendous opportunity to interact with all sorts of clients. But for as much as I loved FX Sales, as time went on, I began to miss the type of work I’d done at Penn. So, after almost exactly two years at Credit Suisse, I made the decision to leave in order to attend HBS.

There are so many things I’m looking forward to at HBS—listing everything would take much more room than I have in this post! Certainly, I’m most looking forward to meeting my classmates and to learning from both professors and fellow students. But I’m also very excited to have the time to truly explore the wide variety of career opportunities out there. Though I go back and forth almost every day, I think that my “dream job” lies somewhere within either the social entrepreneurship scene, or the nonprofit management world. For the past two years, it’s been difficult to both balance a highly time-consuming job and explore other career opportunities. Now, however, I feel as I’ve been given an enormous gift of time—time to explore what’s out there, and where I can best make my own contribution.

There are quite a few uncertainties heading into this journey. I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what to expect at HBS, precisely what I want out of the experience, or where I’d like to wind up afterwards. But I’m heading into this with an open mind, and I know that HBS will provide the best possible springboard for virtually every opportunity out there. Trust me--that knowledge makes taking the plunge into the unknown quite a bit easier!